I have been looking forward to an April training camp since the start of the year. After a long tax season at work and an even longer winter in Zurich, this was the focal point that kept me training hard for the past three months. Originally my plan was to join coach Bondarchuk’s group at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista and compete once again at Mt. SAC to watch Kibwe and Sultana win. But getting to Chula Vista isn’t as easy when you are coming from Europe. As my trip shrunk in length it just didn’t make much sense to travel all that way for a camp.

Thankfully another opportunity showed up. I decided to travel south once again to Tuscany last Thursday and join my club’s sprint group for a 10-day training camp. I am the only thrower making the trip from Zurich, but since I often train alone in Zurich I do not mind. Plus, I occasionally have a training partner here since Olympic silver medalist Nicola Vizzoni lives nearby.

After training with Peter on Sunday he asked me what my training plan was leading up to my first competitions over the next two weeks. On Saturday my club will be hosting a small throwing meet in Zurich and next week I will be travelling to Spain for the European Cup Winter Throwing event. I told him that I had no special plan; training will continue as normal. “Why compete then?” he asked.

He posed a good question. But I have a better question: “Why not?” I can list a dozen reason why I likely won’t have a good result. Most importantly I plan to do normal training up until and including the day before the competition, I will be throwing alongside six of my youth throwers making it almost impossible to focus on my own throw, I have worked with a coach just a handful of days in the past months, I have not touched a competition weight hammer for more than four weeks, and since we are in the middle of the tax season I’ve been working overtime the past few weeks. But there is still no reason not to compete. My fear of having a bad result next to my name vanished after a few bad seasons in my career. Why not compete?

One word to summarize my last month of training would be slow. Progress in distance has been slow. Progress in technique has been slow. And even practice itself is slow as the I’ve had to sludge through a lot of snow. Through the start of the month I was in great shape, but poor weather conditions made it hard to convert that into a good result. Thankfully I finally received a pair of over-shoe snow traction devices now that the snow has finally melted. I also have moved on to a new program and lost my chance to see how far I was really ready to throw. This new program is a transition program aimed at transferring those good results into the slightly heavy 8-kilogram hammer.

The results are good so far, at least two meters better than last February with the 8-kilogram hammer, but I feel like things could be going even better if I were making more technical progress at this point. While I think I have kept many of the technical gains I made before Christmas, I have failed to progress more mostly because it has been difficult to find time to meet with a coach again. Hopefully that will change over the next month. In any event, a two meter advantage is still great to have and will keep me on track to break 70-meters this summer. In the meantime, below you can find some video of a recent training session taken from the side and without the net in the way. It provides a new point of view and clearer look at where my technique currently stands.

As the saying goes: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. After complaining about training in winter conditions a few days ago, I decided to just give in and embrace the winter. I took an extra day off of training to spend a long weekend of enjoying winter sports activities and relaxing with Kate in picturesque St. Mortiz.

Naturally the first thing to try out was the bobsled, which was born in St. Moritz more than a century ago. The historic Olympia Bobrun from St. Moritz to Celerina has hosted two Olympic Games and is the only all natural ice track in the world. The track records are reset yearly as the track is rebuilt from scratch and carved from snow with slight variances each time. The Swiss are also one of the best nations in the history of the sport. Just think of the focused Swiss team in the movie Cool Runnings and you know what level of respect they get in the sport. Switzerland has more medals than any other country in the bobsled and the 2010 Vancouver Games actually marked the first time since 1964 that the Swiss team did not win a medal. Throwers also have a close connection to bobsled.

This is the time of the year when many athletes are posting their New Year’s resolutions. You won’t find that here. I’m not a big person for New Year’s resolutions. For me, the new year starts in October when I begin training. January 1st is in the middle of the year, with months of training behind me and many more months ahead.

I’m also not a big goal person in general. I tend to think that specific goals are mostly needed when you do not know what direction to go. Sure, I want to throw over 70 meters, but writing that down on a piece of paper is not going to help the matter at all. My biggest goal is vague: I want to throw as far as I can. As long as I work my ass off towards that goal, everything else will fall into place. I know what direction I am heading, the question is only how far along that path I will proceed this year. And in many ways that is out of my hands.

As of December 7th, I have been on vacation until the end of the year. It was a welcome break and after a more strenuous year at work, it will give me four weeks to focus on my training, my family, and a few of my side projects. I will write later this week about one of the projects, but for now I would like to provide an update on training.

I detailed how much I have been focusing on my winds during my last training update in November. I had made substantial progress over the last year and it was beginning to set up the throw nicely and consistently. For the first two months of training I focused on, among other things, a slower start, flater orbit, better posture, and better rhythm in the winds. All this put me in a better position to push the hammer. Now that this is more stable I have progressed to thinking more about the turns.

Since my season ended in September, my own training has barely warranted a mention on this site. Part of the reason is because I took a few weeks off. But the main reason is that I was trying out some new things and didn’t want to post until I had some concrete feedback about whether or not it was successful. On Monday I began my second training block of the season, so now is a good time to talk about how my training has started out for the 2013 season.

As Kibwe noted on his blog this week, Fall training is a perfect time to work on technique. If is dangerous to try to exaggerate changes, take a lot of low intensity throws, or do other drastic adjustments during the competitive season because it can throw off your rhythm enough to ruin a few competitions. But in the Fall you have plenty of time to play around and find out what works and what doesn’t. Like Kibwe, I am focusing on improving my winds and entry. The start of the throw is the most important since if there are problems there, they will be amplified as the throw progresses. But unlike Kibwe, I don’t have the most decorated coach in history watching my every move. This makes the process more difficult since even though I know what I want to fix, I have to rely on feeling and that can be deceptive at times (what feels good might just be what is comfortable, not what is better). In addition, an external pair of eyes can give you a different perspective.

Autumn is the time of year that most people work on three things: technique drills, heavy weight training, and heavy hammers. While our annual planning model doesn’t follow that same route, I am in the middle of a training block where I am throwing just the heavy 9-kilogram (19.8-pound) hammer. In this respect, hammer throwers around the world are ahead of the other event groups. I know many shot putters that throw only the competition weight hammer, out of fear for ruining their rhythm. I know others that might dabble only with light shot puts. But it seems the majority avoid heavy shot puts. It is a similar story in other events. Despite this, it can still be difficult to find training hammers in various weights.

This post is not about rehashing why this is an important part of training (the two main reasons are: overweight implements help develop special strength and, as I pointed out again last week, training variation is critical). What it is about is how to find the best implements to train with. After nearly a decade of training in Seattle I had amassed a personal arsenal of perhaps 30 hammers with 18 different weights ranging from 2-kilogram to 16-kilogram (plus an adjustable weight hammer I inherited from Ken Shannon). Now that I have moved to Zurich I have slowly been increasing my club’s inventory with the help of Polanik. This is essential to becoming a good hammer thrower. Even if you focus on the weight throw throughout the winter(which again, I am not a fan of), it is still helpful to have a variety of weights to use so that you can work on different aspects of the throw.

The concept of an offseason is very foreign to me. I know all about the regular season, the preseason, as well as winter and fall training. But the offseason is truly uncharted territories. That is why I initially panicked when I sent Dr. B my training results after my last meet and received this short message in response: “Martin. Stop training. 3 Weeks passive rest. AB”

Three weeks might not sound like much, but let’s put that in perspective for me. Last year I took just ten days off after my season ended … and that was for my honeymoon. That was my biggest break in years and I did everything to make the break as short as possible, including training up until the morning of my wedding and again on the day I returned from the trip. Back in 2007 I rested the most after the season since I worked full-time throughout the summer. But while I took more days off each week, I never took more than a few days off at one time. In all other recent years I didn’t take a break. My memory from way back in 2002 is vague and recorded only in training journals thousands of miles away, but as I recall that was the last time I took a very long break from throwing. I was 18 then.

As my training camp came to a close yesterday, I couldn’t have been happier with the progress I made over 10 days and 16 training sessions. My season plan may have been interrupted by setbacks in May, but now I am in the best shape of my life. In addition to the personal best with the 9-kilogram hammer on Monday I had personal training bests with the competition weight 7.26-kilogram hammer on both Friday and Saturday. First I launched 67.30 meters (video below) and then came back the next day to toss 67.70 meters. I had only thrown over 67 meters twice in training before, but this week I had nearly a dozen throws at or over that distance and am capable of more.